Kitty Burns Florey

Excerpts:

Diagramming sentences is one of those lost skills, like darning socks or playing the sackbut, that no one seems to miss. When it was introduced in an 1877 text called Higher Lessons in English by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, it swept through American public schools like the measles, embraced by teachers as the way to reform students who were engaged in (to take Henry Higgins slightly out of context) “the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.” By promoting the beautifully logical rules of syntax, diagramming would root out evils like “it’s me” and “I ain’t got none”....

Even in my own youth, many years after 1877, diagramming was serious business. I learned it in the sixth grade from Sister Bernadette.

Sister Bernadette: I can still see her, a tiny nun with a sharp pink nose, confidently drawing a dead-straight horizontal line like a highway across the blackboard, flourishing her chalk in the air at the end of it, her veil flipping out behind her as she turned back to the class. We begin, she said, with a straight line. And then, in her firm and saintly script, she put words on the line, a noun and a verb – probably something like dog barked. Between the words she drew a short vertical slash, bisecting the line. Then she drew a road – a short country lane – that forked off at an angle under the word dog, and on it she wrote The.

That was it: subject, predicate, and the little modifying article that civilized the sentence – all of it made into a picture that was every bit as clear and informative as an actual portrait of a beagle in mid-woof. The thrilling part was that this was a picture not of the animal but of the words that stood for the animal and its noises. It was a representation of something that was both concrete (we could hear the words if we said them aloud, and they conveyed an actual event) and abstract (the words were invisible, and their sounds vanished from the air as soon as they were uttered). The diagram was the bridge between a dog and the description of a dog. It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was much more than words uttered, or words written on a piece of paper: it was a picture of language.

I was hooked.

*

Diagramming, of course, is only one of the more recent attempts to reform the English language, an objective that is far from new. It probably began with the invention of the printing press, which brought books to the masses and saw the beginnings of attempts to codify the big sloppy mess that was English. By the eighteenth century, dictionaries had been written, grammarians were being born, language snobs were rampant, and confusion continued to reign -- as it does today. During its first many hundreds of years, as the language sorted itself out, it had been allowed to do anything it liked. Who and whom were interchangeable, more better was perfectly acceptable, and Shakespeare never really could decide how to spell his own name. (Shakspere? Shaksper? Shakspear? Schakspere?) But eventually, the people who like things to be neat and tidy began to get on the case of people who just want to let it all hang out as long as they, like, express themselves. It was decreed that splitting infinitives was a crime and that ending sentences with prepositions was something up with which we should not put.

I love E. B. White’s example, in a 1962 letter to his publisher, of a sentence that ends with five prepositions: “A father of a little boy goes upstairs after supper to read to his son, but he brings the wrong book. The boy says, ‘What did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to out of up for?’”

*

I grew up in a richly grammar-infused household. My grandmother forced my scholarly and high-achieving mother, the oldest of eight, to quit high school at sixteen and contribute to the family income -- in other words, to trade in her dream of being a Latin teacher for a job on the switchboard in a department store. Her meticulous grammar, her appreciation for a well-turned phrase, her curiosity about words, her apparently inborn gift for perfect spelling, her Latin prizes -- even her beautiful handwriting, which persisted unchanged until her extreme old age -- were suddenly irrelevant. My mother lived a very long time, but she never got over that disruption in her early life.

But once I was born, she had a pupil-in-residence she could put the teacherly screws to. (She would probably disapprove of that last sentence’s final preposition: her formal schooling ended in 1926, when grammarians and teachers were still clinging to the mostly doomed attempt to stuff the unruliness of English into the well-made boxes of Latin and Greek, which is something like forcing a struggling cat into the carrier for a trip to the vet.) Mom thought diagramming was the cat’s pajamas. I don’t know if she learned it in elementary school – she was almost exactly contemporary with Eudora Welty – but it was just the kind of meticulous, practical, and good-for-you activity that she liked, like learning to iron my father’s shirts from a pamphlet put out by the government after the war (collar first, front last). I still remember, at age nine, waking up early one morning to find that Mom -- who must have checked my homework the night before -- had left me a note propped against the Cheerios box. In her firm, disciplined script, it read I before E except after C. I had never heard this homily before, and I truly thought that my mother had lost her marbles and was now communicating in a code known only to herself and perhaps the crowd of Martians who had taken her over.

I have obviously inherited a degree of language snobbery. As a human being, I rejoice in a devil-may-care approach to grammatical correctness. I love ingenious slang terms and vivid language -- and our dialects, which are one of the few ways left to us of preserving our regional identities. But as my mother’s daughter and a copy editor to boot, I must officially deplore them all.
*

Unlike most things we did in school, diagramming had a quality of entertainment.

It also had another virtue. Writing can be terrifying for students in those vulnerable and insecure pre-teen years. This wasn’t true for me – I’ve been shamelessly willing to put my thoughts on paper at the drop of a pencil for as long as I can remember – but for my old sixth-grade friend Rosamond, a blank page was almost as intimidating as the after-school dances the nuns forced us to attend a year or so later, with Buddy Holly blaring tinnily from a portable record player, the boys milling around (staring at their shoes, hands in pockets, snickering) on one side of the room, and the girls on the other making small-talk, each one wondering miserably why she wore that horrible skirt that makes her look fat and must be the reason no one is dancing with her. Rosamond says that, for her, writing was just that ghastly: when “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”-time came around, her hands went clammy and her mind went blank.

But diagramming – that was another world. The only thing that mattered was whether a sentence was diagrammed correctly, and that could be demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction by means of a few intersecting lines. It was a game; it wasn’t about you. There was no room for opinion. You weren’t being judged on the contents of your soul or the quality of your imagination. You weren’t writing drivel, you weren’t failing to do justice to an idea that gripped you, you weren’t afraid of being too fanciful or too dry or too simple-minded – all you needed was accuracy. Brilliant diagramming, unlike brilliant writing, was something that could be learned.*